LICENSING.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCIII, Issue 10652, 13 May 1895, Page 3

LICENSING.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sis.-—Every right-thinking man (even, I trust, including the most rabid prohibitionist) will agree with me, I hope, in applauding to tho echo the common-sense decision of Mr Bishop on Friday last iu dismissing tho information herein against the proprietor of Coker’s Hotel for (through his barmaid) unknowingly a prohibit. Docs the Legislature expect a lady bar-tender to personally know and have a familiar and intimate acquaintance with every unfortunate prohibit ? Forbid it, ye gods ! Tot it would even eeom so. It is well-known that prohibits Invariably attempt hotels to which they are usually strangers, and of .■which, they are non-fraquenters, and this for a very obvious reason. I should like to have shown publicly how many unexpired prohibition orders (fiftyfive, I believe) are, at tho data of my writing, on the file of every hotelkeeper iu this city. It would indeed be instructive to have this “black list.” Tat all these sad records, and the many characters (individual characters, I moan), are supposed by a fiction of law to be as it were at tho fingers’ end of every bar-tender. "What rot! If every prohibit were tattooed, there might ba aoma ground for complaint for non-obsemnea of the law. I believe this fad had its birth in the fertile brain of our present Comptroller-Genera!, James Edward Fitzgerald, erstwhile Superintendent of Canterbury, but it has been, and always will bo, impracticable. Yet it is indeed refreshing to a degree to welcome such a very acceptable interpretation of this question as rendered by Mr Bishop. More power to him.—l am, &c., HART.